Nabil Shaath, a member of Fatah’s Central Committee, said that Goldstone apparently succumbed to pressure because he could no longer bear the terror directed against him.  “You cannot exempt Israel from the crimes it committed in Gaza,” Shaath said.

Hamas dismissed Goldstone’s “regrets” expressed in a Friday Washington Post op-ed article.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, said that the South African judge “retreat does not change the fact war crimes had been committed against 1.5 million people in Gaza.”

Abu Zuhri demanded that the United Nations implement the Goldstone Report despite the judge's reservations, claiming it is a UN document and not a personal report of the head of the committee that authored it.

Goldstone published an opinion piece in which he said: “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”

Goldstone said the fact-finding mission’s allegations that Israel took actions which intentionally led to the death and injury of civilians, were based on the information available to him at the time.

He also defended portions of the report, particularly those that accused Hamas of violations and which he said marked the first time that Hamas was investigated and condemned by the United Nations.

Amnesty International said that 1,400 Palestinians were killed during the offensive. Of these, 300 were children, more than 115 were women and about 85 were men over the age of 50.

Amnesty said that another 200 of the men who were under 50 were unarmed civilians who were not combatants. Some 5,000 Palestinians were wounded during the fighting.

Amnesty International also found that more than 3,000 Palestinian homes and hundreds of other properties were destroyed during the fighting and more than 20,000 structures were damaged.

Yasser Abed Rabbo, the secretary-general of the PLO Executive Committee, said that the blood of those Palestinians killed in Israeli offensive will not be erased by one person who changes his mind.

“There was a war crime,” Abed Rabbo said, adding that Goldstone has no right to retract a report based on documents that were examined by the parties and subject to specific criteria, not on a personal whim.

Riyad Al-Maliki, the Palestinian Foreign Affairs Minister, said Goldstone's comments did not change a thing. “The report was as clear as the crimes that Israel committed during the war,” Al-Maliki said.